The Dominion of Oil

By Kathy Skerritt



The Gallery at Old Stone

1380 Ontario Street

Cleveland, Ohio 44113



November 19, 2010 through January 30, 2011

Gallery Hours: Monday—Friday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Opening Reception: Friday, November 19—5 p.m. to 7 p.m.



The Dominion of Oil at Old Stone Gallery (November 19, 2010 through January 30, 2011), Old Stone Church, Cleveland, Ohio is a solo exhibition by Cleveland-born painter Kathy Skerritt. Deeply disturbed by the rhetoric around and implications of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the southern coast of the United States in 2010, Skerritt was impelled to respond in a definitive manner. She felt an urgency to move beyond the usual ways of removing oneself from events that seem to not be connected to the personal because they occur in distant locales. To this end, and for the first time in her portfolio, the artist incorporates quotes and written narrative onto the painted surfaces, offering up the words that influenced how individuals, communities, and nations responded to the event as well as words that may have not yet been heard. The Dominion of Oil is not only Skerritt’s response to Deepwater Horizon. It is a culminating expression of the implications of a much larger pattern of human degradation of Earth inclusive of the Prudhoe Bay/Exxon Valdez oil spill as well as the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields. New works include “Drill, Baby, Drill!”, “I Want My Life Back”, “You Can’t Fool the Fish”, “Regeneration of the Diatoms (Restoration of the Beautiful)”, and “Whose Cry? Whose Voice?” depicting the artist’s response to the Niger River Delta catastrophe in which the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez has been spilled onto the land and into the water every year for at least the past two decades.



Attached Postcard Images:

Far Left Image: “Whose Cry? Whose Voice?” (4’x5’) is the artist’s response to the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez being spilled in Nigeria every year for at least the past twenty.

Far Right Image: Detail of “I Want My Life Back” (6”x36”) is the artist’s response to being implicated in Deepwater Horizon merely by being a consumer of oil-based products.



For more information contact Beth Giuliano, Director for the Arts and Community Development, by phone or email:

Email: beth@oldstonechurch.org

Phone: 216-241-6145 ext. 23



Opening Reception Friday, November 19, 2010 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.